Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Instead
of Austen and Balzac, the professor [Piketty] ought to read "Animal
Farm" and "Darkness at Noon."

--The Wall Street Journal Any
reading of Piketty’s Capital in the
Twenty-First Century has to come to terms with the conditions of
possibility for its popularity. Why has Thomas Piketty become a “rock
star”? In part, Piketty’s text concretizes left-liberal consensus around
contemporary capitalism, and does so in a way amenable to the technocratic,
social-managerial orientations of left-liberalism: with data, lots of it,
stretched over a long enough period to induce a kind of bleak fatalist belief
in capitalism’s sempiternality. Like the political scientists about
whom I last blogged, Piketty’s work in part repackages the commonly known
as the expertly known. But—and here’s the other part, and one that
distinguishes his work from that of those whom I critiqued—he does so in a way
that validates historically common ways of knowing the economic. Every review
has remarked upon the prominence of the cultural within Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The problem has been one of
determining the relationship between the cultural object and the economic
analysis. For Piketty’s WSJ
reviewer cited above, the cultural
seems to provide, maximally, a kind of overarching attunement to the phenomena
discussed; minimally, a kind of shorthand for the bundling of norms and facts
presented in the text. For others, Piketty’s fun with Austen, Balzac, and Don
Draper are pedagogically useful, sure, but somewhat ornamental, even
superfluous. The reviewer in The
Nation writes

“Discussions of Balzac and Jane Austen are
mildly helpful as demonstrations of the attitudes toward capital in the
nineteenth century, but they offer rapidly diminishing returns and do little to
substantiate Piketty’s strange contention that novelists have lost interest in
the details of money, a claim plausible only to someone who has never heard of
Tom Wolfe or Martin Amis. Other references—Mad Men, Django
Unchained, Damages and, repeatedly, Titanic—add
even less.”

Culture
as attitude, culture as exemplum—ultimately, culture as superfluous.

But
that’s not quite right. For Piketty isn’t simply staging the “attitudes” of
European bourgeoisies to capitalism in the early nineteenth century. Rather, he
is staging the adequacy of their
representations of it. (In that, he’s riding the rails laid down by a gang of
Marxist literary scholars.) Conversely, I take Piketty’s claim (which struck me
as bizarre at first, too) that novelists don’t talk about money anymore to mark
less an empirical fact than an epistemological disadequation. That is, cultural
objects might represent the economic today, but they cannot know it in a referentially meaningful
way. If Tom Wolfe is talking about money, he might as well not be. It’s
intriguing, in this regard, that the contemporary aesthetic objects that Piketty
is drawn toward tend to be historical fictions (Mad Men, Django
Unchained, Titanic), as if
art can know economic pasts but can’t get a grip on its present.

With
his literary “demonstrations,” I am suggesting, Piketty forces readers to
reckon with the constitutive break between the literary and economic
epistemologies and forms of representation. Another way of putting this: The
novel used to be able to know the economic in a referentially adequate way. It
no longer can. What each citation of Austen recalls was a harmonious time in
which literary and economic epistemologies weren’t so different, when literary
and economic genres of writing could blend together, a time before the literary
and the economic were made to part ways. (Defoe would probably be a better
example, but Austen was writing through a point of takeoff. On the general
relationship between literary and economic writing in the Anglosphere, read
this.) It’s a subdued point of the book, but it’s there: the material
inequalities associated with capitalism’s takeoff had their parallel in an
induced epistemological inequality. Literature became ornamental, literary
works mere “demonstrations” illustrative of more robust economic concepts (a la
Harriet Martineau’s gawdawful Illustrations of Political Economy [1834]), as a gaggle of political
economists reconstituted economic inquiry as an epistemologically and
generically autonomous field, a field ruled by experts. In a certain way, then,
Piketty’s account of the accumulation of inequality is equally an account—vague,
to be sure—of why it takes an economist to tell you that this is the case. Just
as capital maldistributes wealth, so too does it maldistribute knowledge. His
literary “demonstrations” put us in a position to experience the cognitive
disembedding of the economic from the phenomenologies of the everyday,
phenomenologies that can be accessed in literature and film.

Of course, questions of epistemology and genres of
representation are not Piketty’s primary concern, but he can’t not touch
upon them. For two reasons. Piketty is concerned to set off a struggle
over method in economics departments, which he sees as too mathematized, too
abstract, too ahistorical—in a phrase, too much of all the things that make it
impenetrable to lay people. At the same time, Piketty’s own handling of his
massive sets of data, his mode of interpreting and his form of representing it,
requires that his readers take a relaxed approach to statistical precision.
Precision and referential adequacy take a back seat to the omnipresent U curve. Limitations on data, as well
as decisions over how to establish and arrange variables, make all figures
figural. No matter how dense the data, economists have to play fast and loose
with figures all the time—which is why, yes, it might matter whether one is
reading Austen or Orwell.

So, if Piketty is a “rock star,” maybe it’s because
there’s something a little punky, a little DIY, a little put-together-on-the-run at work in
his text. And that’s what I want to hold on to from a book I really truly
hated. It’s been depressing to me that people are reading Piketty’s book as if
they’re learning something substantive about the world through economics when,
as I understand it, Piketty’s work makes legible the primitive accumulation of
economic knowledge, the enclosure of a proper sphere of economic knowledge that
cut into spaces of the commonly known. Indeed, the last book on economic
history to inspire an analogous, but lower-key, kind of pop frenzy—Graeber’s Debt—worked
precisely to re-embed economic thinking in the space of the social, to common
economic thinking by turning to the genre of the anecdote, the ethnography.
Alas, it was written off by a certain socialist publication—“We need more grand
histories, but 5,000 years of anecdotes is no substitute for real political
economy,” as the banner runs—which, alongside many left-lite publications, is
going (to go) gaga for Tommy P. But to posit the non-substitutability of genres
of the ordinary for those of the expert is to inscribe managerialism as a
guiding principle of our radicalism. It’s also to subordinate one’s epistemic
autonomy to experts, thereby foregoing the radical work of developing ways of
knowing in common. The enthusiasm over Piketty, in other words, is
premised on a refusal of epistemic autonomy, of the work of epistemic communization. Let me be clear: I simply
cannot imagine that the US left has learned anything useful or meaningful from
Piketty’s book, so I can only understand the book’s enthused reception in those
quarters as a ritualization of epistemic lack. Let’s call it the socialist’s
Daddy-Mommy-Me: the economist, his data, and the good little boy just so
pleased that ma and pa have validated his sense of the real.

Let’s hold on to the punky Piketty, then, the one
in the midst of an oedipal revolt against the discipline. The one who insists
that “the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to
economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers,” who insists that
“[d]emocracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts.” The literary
appears in Capital in the Twenty-First Century as one enactment of this
epistemic democracy—a lost democracy, to be sure, one that was never really
democratic anyhow, but one that persists as a sign of alternative
epistemological ecologies. To read with the punky Piketty—and against
the feted prof who insists several times that “[i]nequality is not necessarily
bad in itself”—is to continue the work of democratizing economic knowledge. To
see in a novel, in an ethnographic anecdote, or in the performative scene of
submission conjured on payday the knowledges we need to know. And what we know,
in the form of knowledge generated in these encounters, is that economics is
ultimately defective for democracy: to democratize economic knowledge is to
destroy it.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

“Rich
people rule!” Didja know? Of course you did. But, according to Larry
Bartels, political scientists just proved it. Business
Insiderhas just reported on the same study, one that proves that “economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups
and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Sorry for
blowing your minds, comrades. But you can’t silence an idea whose time has
come, remember.

When I first read Bartels’ piece, I kind of just wrote it
off as just another piece in the extensive pundit-class discourse of Liberal
Eye-Opening. But then I re-read it. The problem, I realized, isn’t simply that
Bartels is telling me what I already know. The piece isn’t useless; indeed, it
has multiple effects, precisely to the extent that it tells me what I assumed
as given. In telling me something I already know, Bartels’ piece is actually
telling me that I never really knew what I thought. At stake in the piece, in
other words, is a redistribution of the epistemic in which the kinds of
knowledge I possess turn out to be non-knowledges. The real thesis of this
piece—which thinks it’s telling us that economic elites have corrupted
democratic governance—is that the demos
isn’t equipped to know democracy’s destruction.

Let’s begin with the recognition of a simple fact. By
grasping that the rich rule in Anno Domini 2014, it’s taken U.S. poli.sci
departments a real long time to accord truth-value to something that pretty
much every human being knows. Sure, people figure and operationalize this
common knowledge in diverse, antagonistic ways; plenty of people are pretty
okay with class rule. But anyone who has been conscious for an election cycle,
say, or worked at a job—that is, depended on someone else for subsistence,
submitted one’s bodily and cognitive dispositions to the commands of another—or
realized that they’ll never golf with Barry knows that rich people rule. Almost
everyone: political scientists, apparently, constitute the one exception. Luckily,
though, due to a new “stunningly documented” study by Bartels’ friends, what
everybody knows now counts as knowledge. Knowledge, friends. Shit you can cite.

By “documented,” of course, we’re talking about a
translation of commonsense into data. To be sure, as Bartels recognizes, any
freshman in any Intro to Theory course—from literary theory to anthropology to
sociology to (maybe?) poli.sci—would know, through Hegel, Marx, or even ole
Adam Smith, that “economic power” (I’ll get to this fine euphemism) is
political power, functionally if not normatively. But the form of knowing set
to work in this theory is not the way poli.sci knows now: “Qualitative
studies of the political role of economic elites have mostly
been relegated to the margins of the field.” It’s astonishing: the very
belatedness of positivist methodologies to accede to the level of
what-everyone-ever-already-knows doesn’t impel Bartels to reconsider the
epistemic configuration of his field. Indeed, even as Bartels notes the
belatedness of poli.sci to what-everyone-knows, he asserts the epistemic
superiority of poli-sci’s methods: “political scientists are belatedly turning
more systematic attention to the political impact of wealth, and their
findings should reshape how we think about American democracy.”They are
tardy to the party, sure, but quantitative political scientists have brought
the dope dope—a capacity for “rigorous (meaning quantitative) scientific
investigation.” (Hegel could barely count to three before it turned into one
again; Poor Adam, meanwhile, didn’t give a fig for political arithmetic; and
everyone from Engels on knows that Karl was just rubbish with his maths.)

My problem isn’t with numbers, pie charts, and databases as
such. My problem, rather, is with this celebration of a depleted
epistemological ecology—not because I love epistemological diversity as such,
either, but because I think poli.sci’s ongoing and dead-on impression of an
epistemological wasteland functions as a prophylactic against the immediacy,
urgent, and (as Bartels would admit) valid
claims made in other epistemic registers.

Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that
something like a 1% exists. (It’s actually more like a 10% for the purposes of
the study he cites.) I refer back to Occupy’s figuration for two reasons. One,
I imagine that Bartels would be rather sympathetic to the liberal-progressivist
ends to which this slogan was put, or at least not hostile. Two, it’s a figure
that drew upon pop economic knowledge, that attempted to derive from the latter
the kind of epistemic aura that numbers hold for Serious People. It would have
been utterly natural for Bartels to have referred to this figure, to the social
movement that buoyed it, to the knowledges that sustained it. Instead, he
directs us to “a flurry of commentary” surrounding McCutcheon v. FEC, a case adjudicated well, well after Occupy. If
Occupy was a movement touting an idea whose time had come, Bartels refuses to validate
forms of knowing that know too soon,
forms of knowing that short circuit the positivist time of coming-to-know with the
punctuality of a deeply plebeian “Shit’s fucked up and bullshit!”

But that’s what liberalism is, really: the absorption of the
immediacy of a political sense into the studied, slow time of useless
intellection, the conflation of taking-time and having-a-(truer-)thought. The
bourgeois public sphere, the Parliamentary Blue Book, the parliamentary
labyrinth of US congressional procedure, the ballot box, and, sure,
contemporary political-scientific methods—all of these liberal forms articulate
a slowing of time to a production of thought in the name of optimizing a
decision that will never come. Just think about statistical methodologies, the
kinds of datasets that would be required to prove that, yes, class power is
political power: the study Bartels cites involves 1779 policy outcomes from
over a period of twenty years just to make the minimal suggestion that things
work out, probably, politically speaking, maybe, for rich folk. (Intriguingly,
neither Bartels nor the study incorporate the fact that no one has done such a
study into their understanding of class power. The fact that scholars assume, against empirical reality, a
liberal-inflected “Majoritarian Electoral Democracy” as their primary analytic
framework doesn’t register as an index of the functioning of class rule.
Instead, they code the qualitative effectivity of bourgeois ideology as nothing
more than a poor analytic frame for marshaling quantitative empirics.) How big
of a dataset would be required to suggest that capitalism, class power, and the
liberal-democratic state all have something to do with one another? (Of course,
Bartels doesn’t’ say capitalism or class power—he speaks of a bland “economic
power,” as if plutocrats could be deriving their dough from a super-successful
autonomous workers’ collectivity they’re members of just as easily as from
heavily financialized capitalist exploitation.)

As a speech act, then, Bartels’ post’s primary effect isn’t
simply to affirm plebeian sense, to say, “You guys were right; class power is a
thing; sorry for our belatedness.” Rather, its primary effect is to assert the
deficiency of plebeian sense even when it
is right. You didn’t know what you know until rigorous poli.sci people knew
it. The effect is to delaminate political knowledge from the polis, democratic sense from the demos. We’ll only know that democracy is
fucked when experts mathematize it. Until the datasets come in, chill out—we
don’t know anything yet.

I used to giggle at the scientism of early Marxism—Marx and
Engels, Lenin and Luxemburg, Lukacs and Althusser, on and on. But now I’m
beginning to think that this scientism wasn’t supposed to achieve any kind of
scientific positivity, that Marxism’s valorization of the scientific didn’t
intend a valorization of positive knowledges. (Stalin, we might say, wasn’t
part of the plan.) What Marx desired in seizing hold of the term “science” was
to create and defend a space in which plebeian forms of knowing could be
entertained as knowledge—a knowledge that doesn’t require validation from
positive or theoretical science, but rather productive transcription into it.
This is what Marx does in what have become my favorite paragraphs in volume one
of Capital. It’s the “Working Day”
chapter, a few pages in. Marx has just exfoliated the capitalist’s sense of
work-time. And then, dramatically, the worker enters the scene of knowledge
production:

“Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker,
which had previously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production
process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of
commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs…’”
(342)

And the worker continues, making fine conceptual
distinctions, offering mathematical examples, and generally talking the
language of political economy. Lest you think Marx is simply ventriloquizing a
worker to ground his theory, he assures us in a footnote, “During the great
strike of the London building workers…their committee published a manifesto
that contained, to some extent, the plea of our worker” (343). This is
knowledge from the streets, as it were, but what Marx is working us toward is a
disposition where we can treat it as knowledge,
knowledge as such, without reservations.

We need to follow Marx in defending the discursive space in
which the plebeian voice “suddenly” appears, to follow Marx in holding onto
knowledge charged by forms of urgency that can’t settle themselves into a
dataset, a Blue Book, a Parliamentary inquiry. To open space where another’s
words can erupt as knowledge is to begin a communization of the epistemic. We
need, I think to begin to trust that what we do on picket lines and in
occupations, at meetings and in workshops, on Twitter and on blogs, is in fact
productive of knowledges we need to have—urgent knowledges, sudden knowledges
that can’t wait for positivist transcription. Knowledges whose time has not yet
come.